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"We've come here to
rest----"
"Peace, perfect peace...."
"I don't believe you," said Miss Stiles, tossing her head. "I'd be
disappointed to think it of you."
Alice Ronder gave her nephew a curious look, half of amusement, half of
expectation.
"It's quite true, Ellen," she said. "Now, if you've finished your tea,
come and look at the rest of the house."


Chapter III
One of Joan's Days

I find it difficult now to realise how apart from the life of the world
Polchester was in those days. Even now, when the War has shaken up and
jostled together every small village in Great Britain, Polchester still
has some shreds of its isolation left to it; but then--why, it might have
been a walled-in fortress of mediaeval times, for all its connection with
the outside world!
This isolation was quite deliberately maintained. I don't mean, of course,
that Mrs. Combermere and Brandon and old Bentinck-Major and Mrs. Sampson
said to themselves in so many words, "We will keep this to ourselves and
defend its walls against every new invader, every new idea, new custom,
new impulse.


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